Michel Valstar

Automatic Understanding of Human Behaviour

Michel Valstar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham, School of Computer Science, and a researcher in Automatic Visual Understanding of Human Behaviour. He is a member of both the Computer Vision Lab and the Mixed Reality Lab. This encompasses Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and a good idea of how people behave in this world. He was recently a Visiting Researcher at the Affective Computing group at the Media Lab, MIT, and a research associate with the iBUG group, which is part of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Michel’s expertise is facial expression recognition, in particular the analysis of FACS Action Units. He recently proposed a new field of research called 'Behaviomedics', which applies affective computing and Social Signal Processing to the field of medicine to help diagnose, monitor, and treat medical conditions that alter expressive behaviour such as depression.

28/01/2014: eMax released! eMax is both an API and a set of tools to analyse faces. Currently it comes with models that predict the six basic emotions and a set of FACS Action Units (AUs) using Local Gabor Binary Patterns from Three Orthogonal Planes (LGBP-TOP). It is freely available for non-commercial use. To request a copy, contact Timur Almaev with your GitHub account and a signed EULA along with a brief description what you intend to use MaxE for.

12/08/2013: I’m giving an atelier in facial expression recognition during the Cambridge-based social robotics summer school . Please download the package with the tutorial manual, toy data, and LGBP-TOP Matlab code before starting the atelier.

24/01/2013: G53MLE: From next year, I’ll be teaching the third-year course in Machine Learning, G53MLE, which unfortunately isn’t running this year.

16/11/2012: AVEC test labels publicly available: Now that AVEC 2012 has concluded successfully, we are releasing the test labels for both AVEC 2011 and 2012. Please download them from the AVEC database site using your existing account.

11/06/2012: MayFest activities: The School of Computer Science had a booth during the University of Nottingham’s 2012 MayFest, where we let children and parents wear an Emotiv EEG reader to control a player in a tug-of-war contest. Using your mental power to pull your opponent towards you!